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To be honest, it’s not clear how you got this job.Maybe you applied, maybe it just happenedto you like a piano falling out of a third story window, jingling down black keys of destiny on your incipient male-pattern baldness.

You try and learn how to love. For a guy that’s not easy. Mostly all you have known is movies withexplosions and lots of cleavage. And now, all of asudden, you’re watching a tiny chest rising and falling,speechless before one of the wonders of the world.

Over the years, you walk the wire like you own dad did.Sternly setting your deckchair at strategic points on thebeach, sometimes for well-considered reasons, sometimesjust to prove that you are still bigger and wiser, andthat you do in fact exist and matter somehow in the universe.

But meanwhile there’s the constant undertow. The cloud of unknowing pierced by unforgiving questions. The realization that maybe you don’t understand at all. That all you havesucceeded in becoming is a carbon copy of your own father.And in a way, you don’t mind. As long as the kid is okay.

But then comes the night. And you’re lying awake, listening.Listening for the front door to open and close. Listening for voices to tell you that actually nothing is wrong. Listeningto the vast silence. Listening to your baby crying, because his whole body hurts and he doesn’t understand why.

Were you exhausted from the journeying,tired of the idle kingly chatteror in your golden cups from a night outa every inn in which they made roomfor you and the boys to let your hair down?

Perhaps you just shut your eyes and let go.Maybe that is what this whole gig was about,finding yourself, as they say around here.The star, the baby, the makeshift presents,all that was just a happy accident.

Tomorrow you must turn the horses west,sit straight, and begin the long return tothe steel cage of responsibility.But just for now, sleep well your majesty,for you may never get the chance again.